gener8tor, a nationally ranked accelerator program, has partnered with Boston Scientific to launch a healthcare-focused program in Medical Alley with additional support from the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic. Their first cohort wrapped up in June and the second cohort was announced in July.
Over the next few weeks, we will profile the second cohort of companies.
What does Sunrise Health do?
Sunrise Health allows patients with substance use and mental health conditions to receive stigma-free support through small text-based peer support groups. These groups can be integrated with clinical care thanks to our novel AI tools that detect clinically relevant content (e.g., intent to relapse), allowing care managers to triage their outreach based off the sentiment in peer messages.
What difference does this make for patients?
Behavioral healthcare only works when patients feel comfortable enough to share what’s truly on their mind. Coupled with stigma and accessibility of care issues, this means only a minority of patients in need receive treatment. We give patients 24/7 access to a space of peers they can relate to, which dramatically improves the patient experience, but also gives care managers the bandwidth to handle 7-10x greater patient capacities as peers generate so much engagement on their own.
What motivated you to take on this issue?
I worked as a first responder in multiple fire departments & rescue squads. At every station, I’d run countless suicide attempts and overdoses. Everyone on our team (perhaps everyone in the world) had seen these conditions in family and friends. We noticed patients gravitated towards support groups both face-to-face (e.g., 12 steps) and online (e.g., Reddit), even though these groups had little oversight or integration with clinical care.
What did you do before starting this company?
I was an undergrad at Johns Hopkins University, which I left to found Sunrise. While in Baltimore I worked in sales at another health IT startup and worked within a nonprofit engaging underserved Baltimore high schoolers. Ravi, my co-founder, was at Hopkins for his master’s, having prior built products leading to two exits. Satya, our chief data scientist and first employee, had finished his master’s at Hopkins and was planning for a Ph.D.
How can the Medical Alley community best support your work?
We just closed our seed round and are excited to work with great investors. We are currently seeking innovative behavioral health, substance use, or wraparound service providers to partner with as early adopters of our platform.
And finally, why participate in gBETA?
Minneapolis has a world we want to know better, a concentration of payors.
About gBETA Medtech
gBETA Medtech is a free, seven-week accelerator that works with medical device, healthcare-related software, biotech and diagnostics startups. Part of gener8tor, a nationally ranked accelerator program, gBETA Medtech is in partnership with Boston Scientific and supported by the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota. For more information visit https://www.gbetamedtech.com/
To learn more about Sunrise Health visit http://www.sunrisehealth.co/
